Dan O'Neill: When the Icelanders got a little bit chippy

Who now remembers that 40 years ago this week we were at war.

Who now remembers that 40 years ago this week we were at war. And it was a war that struck at our very vitals, nothing less than an attack on our birthright, remembered by veterans as – pause for ominous chords – as the Battle of the Battered Cod.

Yes, a long dark cloud hung over Caroline Street. For those were the days when the nation’s favourite takeaway was still fish ’n’ chips and Caroline Street, the city’s celebrated Chip Alley, was the place where we citizens took most of it away from. But now the doom-mongers were filling the papers not with fish ’n’ chips (the only way to eat ’em) but with predictions of, well, doom and disaster for the millions who wanted cod, not curry with their chips.

What’s that? Get to the point? OK, the point is that on January 18, 1973, we reached a crucial stage in what historians have labelled The Cod Wars. Sounds a bit like a Gilbert and Sullivan reject but it was hugely disturbing for Britain’s fishing industry when Iceland arbitrarily extended its fishing limits from 12 to 50 miles around its shores, thus cutting off our cod.

For the fabled Fishermen of England (and Wales and Scotland) it was a case of here we go again. That Viking blood seemed to boil whenever our fishing boats were spotted, and it began as far back as 1899 when a trawler called The Caspian was caught catching cod in “their” waters. When the skipper boarded a Danish gunboat to negotiate, his ship did a runner so they lashed him to the mast and bunged him in jail when back in port.

That was a mere skirmish. The first official Cod War began in 1958 when Iceland extended the limits from four miles to 12. By the time it was sorted 53 British frigates had used a large chunk of the navy’s fuel stocks doing nothing very much and it ended with an agreement that future disputes would go to the International Court of Justice.

But in 1972, British trawlers fishing the icy waters of the North Atlantic steamed into the seas off Iceland in the battle to bring cod to Caroline Street, which is one way of putting it. Icelandic patrol boats cut the nets of 18 trawlers. War was declared, the fishermen demanded action from the navy.

But only “super-tugs” were sent to protect the trawlers from ramming, and it took till March before Britain delivered an ultimatum: Call off the Cod War – or face the Royal Navy. The Icelanders simply ignored it and upped the stakes by firing shots across the bows of the super-tug Statesman. More big tugs were sent, Iceland replied by blazing away with rifles. The British responded by chucking lumps of coal and carrots at the foe while loudspeakers boomed out Rule Britannia, Britannia Rules the Waves.

The navy decided to live up to the anthem and sent frigates, the signal for thousands of young protesters to surround the British Embassy in Reykjavik. And the signal for the tabloids to see the Cod War as a heating up the Cold War, maybe a curtain-raiser for World War Three. Soviet submarines and ships were heading for the conflict, they reported – shades of the Cuban Crisis – but no Russkies, and nothing much happening, until the frigate HMS Apollo collided with the Icelandic coastguard vessel Aegir, causing the only fatality of the war – the Aegir’s engineer died.

Perhaps not surprisingly there was some sneaking sympathy for Iceland, seen as a small nation bullied by a bigger one. And as it relied almost entirely on its fishing industry it was as though an army of Norsemen had sloped into the Rhondda to carry off our coal. Britain finally agreed to cut the size of catches, taking 50,000 tons a year less.

Fine, until 1974 when Iceland extended the 50 mile radius to 200 miles. Britain’s trawlers kept fishing, escorted by 22 frigates although only nine were in action at any one time. Skirmishes went on for seven months, ending when Iceland threatened to close a Nato base considered crucial to Western security.

That did it. Nato bigwigs stepped in and the 24 British ships allowed into the 200-mile area were also banned from four other conservation areas, with the Icelandic coastguard given the right to stop and search any vessel suspected of infringing the agreement.

So the cod kept coming to Caroline Street, fish famine averted. But since then Britain’s fishing industry has been decimated and right now there’s a dispute over mackerel fishing.

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